An inspired Prague holiday

A lazy vacation spent lounging on the beach is always refreshing, but when it's over we don't have much more than our tan lines to show for it. A unique vacation experience offered in Prague has been designed around the notion that an educational holiday will send you back home feeling far more rejuvenated and more cultured to boot.

Artbreak is a weeklong arts immersion vacation that gives participants a look at Prague from an arts perspective. The daily schedule consists of morning art classes, afternoon gallery tours and evening performances, though it's not so regimented it doesn't allow for free time and spontaneity.  

 "Three hours of art is enough before [participants] get tired. Then, they're still energized from it; their eyes are open, so to speak, from it," said Douglas Pressman, the creator of Artbreak and one of its two managing directors. "Then, they have lunch, and they go out and learn something else."

Unlike other arts-focused vacations that hire artists not based in the country and book your standard tour guides and tourist-targeted performances, Artbreak takes the depth of its immersion one step further by providing its guests with a local look at the city and its art scene.

"It was never a mass tourism concept," Pressman said.

Instructors for the morning art workshops are all local artists. For example, Klára Dodds, who teaches ceramics and collage for Artbreak, is a Czech ceramicist and the founder of the Prague-based Muddum Art Centre. For the gallery tours (which have included Mánes, Kampa, the National Gallery and private galleries), Artbreak hires professors and academics.

"For example, if participants are taken through a particular section of the National Gallery, the [guide] has an extensive knowledge of the paintings," Pressman said.

As for the evening performances, they are thoughtfully chosen by Pressman and managing director Richard Furych, who handcraft the schedule each time, starting out by going through the events happening that particular week and making their selection based on what they think are the best available activities. They take guests to modern dance, opera, ballet, the symphony and festivals. They tend to frequent some of the same venues that consistently offer very good performances, like Divadlo Ponec, Divadlo Archa and NoD café, but they also like to try something different now and then.

"We like to take a risk with one performance and see what happens," Pressman said. Among their choices so far include the Prague guitar festival and a modern men's dance troupe from Slovakia.

Providing a variety of experiences is an important component to Artbreak. Along with a diverse offering of performances and gallery tours, the art workshops expose participants to four or five different art forms during the week.

"With maybe one exception, participants find they learn something new. For example, film animation," Pressman said. "Surprisingly, few people have done ceramics or some of the painting techniques we teach."

Something for everybody

Thirty percent of past participants are amateur artists, but there is no prior knowledge or skills required to take an Artbreak.

"I had always wanted to go to Prague, and this provided the perfect combination - hands-on art classes and tours of the city from an art perspective," said Sandi McCubin, who comes from San Francisco and participated in Artbreak in 2006.

The background of the attendees is also varied in terms of profession: an advertising executive, a financial director, an architect, an attorney and a retiree have all joined in Artbreak in the past. And the age of participants has ranged from 20 to 70. What they all have in common is an appreciation for the small group environment (groups varying in size from three to 10 people) that Artbreak provides.

"People love the small-group context," Pressman said. "After a few days, it's like they knew each other for years. They have each other to relate to. They learn from each other because of their different backgrounds and ages. They create a little learning community."

Learning is something Pressman (who holds a doctorate in sociology and an MBA) is quite familiar with, as he himself is an educator. He taught at the university level before moving to Prague from the United States in 1996 and has since taught various courses - from international studies to finance to sociology - around the world.

"We used the same approach as I use in teaching when we designed Artbreak: to try by way of different doses of this and that to elicit change in people," Pressman said. "I suppose [Artbreak] is what would happen if a teacher had a chance to design a vacation. This is kind of what happened."

It was his teaching of a well-known creativity course offered at Stanford University's Graduate School of Business that gave him an appreciation for the power of art to transform people. "I saw what art does to people in the world's leading business school."

Artbreak was put together under the inspiration of a book he came across during his studies at Stanford, called Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience.

Getting in the zone

"What the author of the book concluded is that, contrary to what many people believe, doing nothing is actually quite stressful," Pressman said. "When people are involved in a challenge that pushes them a bit, but not too much, they reach the state of flow. Doing art does this."

Despite Pressman's findings that "creative expression, learning and a supportive community" actually provide this more fulfilling, invigorating experience, the average vacation is still centered around sedentary activities that leave many vacationers in need of another.

"We didn't want this to be the case with Artbreak," Pressman said, "and, to our great surprise, reports from the participants show that it isn't."

"I got to see the sights, visit the museums and taste the food, but I also got an in-depth experience that was far more rewarding than the usual vacation," said Jeff Flemings, an advertising professional from Boston who attended Artbreak in 2007. "I think the most important thing I learned is the usual vacation - where you just go from site to site passively taking in the history and beauty - provides a far less involving and rewarding experience."

Joann Plocková can be reached at
features@praguepost.com